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"The Swings" give this year's Green Box Art Festival a lift

The installation "The Swings" is part of the 2014 Green Box Art Festival in Green Mountain Falls, north of Pikes Peak. The project from a Canadian design firm features 10 musical swings that trigger a different note when in motion. Above right, Josh Bailey of Ohio and Quin Gardner of Colorado Spring, both 17, enjoy the ride. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

Back when the world was low-tech, even pre-tech, swings were mankind's idea of a good time. Liberating, tummy-tickling and just a little dangerous, swings could be operated by anybody and everyone, especially kids.

"The Swings," an art installation spending the first two weeks of July in tiny Green Mountain Falls, brings back those simple thrills with an adult twist. It's as much fun as serious art gets.

The work, the centerpiece of this year's Green Box Arts Festival, comes from the Montreal-based Daily tous les jours. The design studio creates objects that encourage collective participation, and this piece invites you to join the band. Get your swing on, and notes start playing.

Choose your instrument: piano, guitar. harp or vibraphone. The higher you go, the higher the pitch, and when more than one swing moves at a time, the melodies get more involved.

As art goes, it's not complicated. Daily tous les jours wants you to consider how people can work together, or not, and to consider your role in a collaborative community.

But few interactive art pieces make participating so irresistible. The physical bar is low; 3-year-olds can swing, and so can their grandparents. You can make it an artful exercise or just an exercise, thrusting your legs, butt, abs and arms to go forward, then contracting in reverse order for rearward lift.

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The art part does sneak in, though. You monitor your speed, height, your connection to your neighbors, you listen hard to yourself, the symphony. The journey elevates into an existential experience, interrupted only when you drag your feet in the dirt to slow down.

That's lot to say about a piece of playground equipment, and in some ways, "The Swings" is just that. It's a humble contraption, just 10 padded blocks strung from rubbery cords. You could walk right past it and hardly notice.

The work is as much architecture as it is art, with simple posts and beams made of stainless steel, powder-coated in white, and with wooden benches that are built into the sides for spectators.

Unlike most kiddie objects, it is designed; sleek in that clean, contemporary, California way. If architects Frank Gehry or Richard Meier, in their early years, had designed a park, it might contain something like this. As night falls, the seats light up on the bottom.

And it is a smart toy, able to extrapolate melodies out of motion and synchronize its electronic tones into a multilayered chunk of music.

That, of course, is what makes it so enjoyable. You can actually play the piece and, for people who always wished they stuck with those piano lessons as a fifth-grader, it is empowering.

Daily tous les jours first created the work in a public plaza in Montreal in 2011 where the goal was to bring together the various entities that co-exist, sometimes unaware of one another, in the urban landscape.

It takes on a different tone on tour in Green Mountain Falls, where the swings sit in a rolling valley with hills rising in all directions. Here, it feels like a gentle intervention in nature. The notes are quiet, and uncomplicated, man-made but soft and bird-like.

This is family-friendly art, as intellectually challenging as you want it to be, and it suits the Colorado summer well.

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